Seen Report: How are London’s gallery workers beating the heat?

Be careful what you wish for. After months of crap weather, we’ve been blessed by the sun and we’re barely coping. The past two weeks are a reminder that while London likes to pretend it’s an international, cosmopolitan city, it’s actually a glorified swamp. I know that across the pond, the Americans have been suffering too, but unlike Los Angeles and New York, we don’t have cool beaches or frosty mountains to escape to, just muddy swimming ponds and concrete ring roads. At this time of year, many in the art world leave for balmy climates, but what about those who stay?

Here at Plaster HQ, the windows are wide open, the fans are on and the freezer’s stocked with Cornettos. We’re not doing too badly. But a trip around the city centre galleries shows that things aren’t going so well. All those wide windows, perfect for enticing passers by, turn the white cubes into greenhouses.

In Britain, we don’t really do air con. It’s simply not worth it for the four hot days we get on average each year. But some galleries do see the benefit in keeping their art, and their staff, cool. Stephen Friedman Gallery is one of those. Sales assistant Bella Bonner-Evans tells me “for those of us left behind, we are refusing to leave the office in place of basking in the gallery’s stellar air con. Suffering collectors, sweltering on the streets of Mayfair, are more than welcome to take reprieve at 5 Cork Street. I am also smashing 5 Diet Cokes a day, but that’s not irregular!”

Another lucky gallerist replied simply with a photo of their AC unit, writing, “jealous?”

If you don’t have AC, then why not install an artwork that also cools you down? At Deptford’s Xxijra Hii gallery, Chris Thompson’s exhibition ‘Kitbash’ includes a large cooling fans. “It’s amazing ” says gallerist Ema O’Donovan. “Credit to Maddy Plimmer our gallery co-ord ” Even without the fan, they’re doing pretty well, “we are lucky to have high ceilings and concrete floors so it stays pretty cool in there, nice and zen.”

With no windows and a heavy steel door, Cambridge Heath’s NEVEN gallery is hot at the best of times, gallerist Helen Neven has her heat treatment down to an iced tea. “Mini desk fan angled directly at face, essential, and adds quite a flattering wind machine effect. Visitors encouraged to reimagine exhibition booklets as hand fans if needed. No installing, deinstalling, filling, sanding — ideally hands moving across keyboard as only physical exertion. And of course try to keep the artwork cool before oneself!” She says, before adding, “100% would offer a discount and early access for an iced drink of any kind!”

No such luck for Jonny Tanna at Harlesden High Street. “It’s an oven,” he says. “We’re attached to a bakery (who sadly have a broken air conditioner – so I have little right to complain in comparison) but whatever it is outside it’s double inside the space, so we’ve been working outside. I literally had a collector say he’ll buy anything if he can just get a glass of ice cold Pepsi with a lemon, sold him a t-shirt instead as we don’t take the piss like that.”

Hector Campbell of south London’s SOUP is, rather sensibly, out of the city, but he says that when the heatwave hit a few weeks back, he improvised an outdoor office in the shady yard usually reserved as a PV smoking area. “It was a lifesaver!”

Laurie Barron at The Artist Room writes, “the same way I cope with most things: Diet Coke.” While the heat seems to have gotten to gallery assistant Billy Parker, “today I am fishing my liquid flesh out of a Soho drain as I slowly melt into the sewer, as I chain smoke in an attempt to clear the internal steam from my eyeballs. By this evening I will remain only a beating heart, pounding against the pavement in a puddle of innards, calling out for salvation.”

Cold drinks are the way to go. One gallerist reports that their local coffee shop is selling out of iced matcha. The run on iced drinks is turning others to crime. Two separate gallerists admitted that they’ve been raiding the work fridges, “one of the good things with private views is that there’s always drinks left over.”

But not everyone’s suffering from the heat. When Andy Wicks of Castor said that he had a heater under his desk, I thought he was taking the piss. No, he really has, he explained, “one of the quirks of having a gallery in a grade II listed church… 😂It might be 30C outside but I need the radiator to take the edge off.” Wait, sorry, it’s turned on? “Sure thing. It’s not cold, just cool and when you’re sat at a desk all day it gets to you. They don’t build these buildings like they used to,” he says. “Better pop outside for some rays.” Sure, whatever works for you, I guess.